Kim Seon-wu

According to the poet Ra Heeduk, Kim's poetry is filled with “bashful yet intense sensuality reminiscent of moist flower petals,” and “her femininity emanates. . .abundance as that of embryonic fluid.” The women in her poetry are “embryos, mothers and midwives all at once.” The image of women as bountiful, life-giving and life-embracing entities dominates her first volume of poetry If My Tongue Refuses to be Locked Up in My Mouth. The poet's celebration of the female body is often accompanied by her revulsion of male oppression. In the title poem, the poet visualizes the feminine desire for freedom from male oppression in a series of unsettling imageries such as “a skull of a baby hanging from its mother’s neck,” and “a gush of beheaded camellias.” The protagonist is forced to sew strips of new skin onto a monster that grows bigger and bigger. Her attempt to kill him ultimately fails because her “good tongue is obsequiously locked up in his mouth.”

Kim Seon-wu (born 1970) is a South Korean feminist poet.

Kim was born in 1970 in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, and is considered part of the new "feminist" wave of Korean poetry. Kim is also known internationally, having been a poet-in-residence at the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation at Victoria University, Wellington, in September and October 2013.